Last year, US Chamber of Commerce president and chief executive Thomas J. Donohue gave an address calling on all publicly traded companies to stop offering quarterly earnings guidance, saying these created a damaging focus on meaningless short-term performance.

"Earnings projections are a fool's game for management," Donohue said. "Companies want to project numbers that will please Wall Street, their shareholders, and all of the bloggers and talking heads on cable TV. But then they get trapped in the expectation of delivering those numbers even as GAAP, as interpreted by the SEC and the trial bar, seems to change every day."

Since then Ford has announced it's joining the ranks of companies not providing earnings guidance. The Washington Post, Coca-Cola, Gillette and Berkshire Hathaway all refuse to issue short-term guidance.

Donohue's comments have some merit. We all know that meeting the numbers by whatever means, from capitalising expenses to claiming revenues on the never-never, can mask all sorts of problems going on inside the company.

But Harvard Business School Professor Jim Heskett raises another question: in an age of transparency, should we expect anything less? Heskett leaves that question open in his piece and the responses to his question show people want more than just numbers.

Even with the demands of transparency, a new global study shows that most company forecasts are less than accurate.

What it boils down to is this: guidance is only one piece of information that's out there. It can never be "perfect" information and most of the time, the truth lies beyond financial models of analysts. Rather than just relying on the guidance, look at the assumptions that underpin the numbers. Are they likely to be right for the long-term or is there a chance that they will change? And is the confidence reflected in the dividend.